Stereophile's Products of 1993

There is a tendency in magazine publishing to concentrate on the present. Writers generally downplay what happened in the irretrievable past as being of lesser importance compared with the new and exciting, their enthusiasm pretty much tied to the ever-in-motion time-line. I instituted Stereophile's annual "Products of the Year" feature, therefore, to give recognition to those components that had proved capable of giving pleasure beyond the formal review period. To confound confusion, there are just five individual categories: "Loudspeakers" (including subwoofers); "Amplification Components" (preamplifiers, power amplifiers, etc.); "Digital Sources" (CD players, transports, D/A processors); "Analog Sources" (phono cartridges, turntables, tonearms, FM tuners, etc.); and "Accessories" (everything else).

The two most important categories are self-explanatory: the "Component of the Year"the Best of the Bestand the "Budget Component of the Year"the Best Sound for the Buck. (Last year's winners were the Mark Levinson No.30 D/A processor and the Spica SC-30 loudspeaker, respectively.)

There is also an "Editor's Choice" award, which I reserve to myself to single out those superb-sounding products that have proved themselves. When a company replaces a line of components less than a year old with a whole new line which, in turn, will be replaced in less than a year, I start to wonder if it's even worth reading the promotional literature. When I'm asked to recommend products, therefore, I fall back on mature products that have proven long-term satisfaction. To be eligible for "Editor's Choice," therefore, a component must have been continuously available for at least a decade.

The formal voting procedure consisted of two steps: First, I asked Stereophile's hardware reviewers each to nominate up to five components in each of the seven categories. To be a contender, a product had to have been reported on in Stereophile between the November 1992 and October 1993 issues, either in a full review or in a Follow-Up. Most importantly, only those components for which a writer had put his opinion on the line for public scrutiny could be nominated. I then put together a ballot form which included all the components that had been nominated by three or more writers and/or editors. In this manner, most of the nominees in most of the categories would have been auditioned by most of the reviewers.

So it proved to be. Fifteen of the magazine's reviewing staff gave three votes for their first choice in each category, two votes for their second choice, and one vote for their third choice (if they had a third choice). I tallied the votes; the results you now hold in your hand.

Down at the pub, you might just get into this same conversation but any hard core Manchester United fan, like the carpenter from Dublin who just came into my home, might look back to 1993 with the same sort of enthusiasm.

Are you or I going to be buying a belt-driven transport like the CEC? Likely, not. I've had just about enough of belt driven turntables, re: wow and flutter, and breaking $5000 MC cartridges installing a new belt (one was enough...), but my what a list of items.

Don't tell me that you wouldn't mind a Krell KSA-250 or 300?

For everyone else,

Look the Bryston 7B was in it's 7B-NRB-THX stage back then. Bryston just realeased their 7B 3 last week (well, it's review came out, anyway). Amazing!

I've never been one for history, but there was one graph (Adbusters, I believe) which showed the decline of Earth species, left to right (falling line) and the increase in consumer products (more brands of toothpaste, etc.), correspondingly...

and this immediately made me interested in the history of technology and it's evolution from sort of the British do-nothing in it's heyday Empire free-man perspective.

That's one side.

On the other, certain objects are just to my eye, intrinsically beautiful.

The Devialet Expert 1000 today may be the more competent product of the two, but to my eye the circuit board of the original D-Premier is much more lovely.

Working on my PhD I recall executing massively parallel Fortran on Crays (and IBM SP3s) from the Unix shell to solve certain classes of partial differential equations. Even screwing up a password involved getting on the phone to the Sys Admin at Lawrence Livermore or Berkeley who didn't differentiate between me and the guy doing top-secret nuclear simulations. Today I (rather, the kids that work for me) run CUDA on GPU grids and write to a cloud. While I have a certain nostalgia for sitting in my basement waiting hours for QBasic programs on, at best, a 486 to produce fractal images (which I my iPhone could do in a second now), which is similar to my nostalgia for listening to really bizarre music at all hours on those ESLs, I have zero nostalgia for those old Crays.

The old stuff makes me think, if I could go back to the 80's, I'd get a better amp for the DQ10's and a more suitable room as well. Then I could build better memories. The lessons of history are valuable things.

Do yourself a favor, compare the prices, for example, of the loudspeakers of the year. High end audio stuff is the only industrial branch I know of, that was able to prevent it's own extinction by introducing prohibititive prices.

I agree those Thiel speakers have a certain visual appeal. I also liked the similar-looking Hales tower speakers from this era. I remember seeing the Hales at a dealer in Indianapolis for the first time, and found the appearance arresting. The aesthetics of the current Mark Levinson gear is a pale imitation of the chunky art decco glory of the stuff from the '90s.

Moreover, much of the gear remains relevant, and could be the basis of a good second system, or even first system. Replacing passive components that age, like capacitors and resistors, with more modern designs can keep older gear refreshed, and in many cases, sounding better than it did when it premiered.

The Levinson gear from this era was also heroically overbuilt, and like a number of other luxury class goods (I'm thinking of automobiles, in particular) continued to compete with newer designs for many years. If I recall correctly, JA was using the Mark Levinson Reference digital processor until it died on him a few years ago, and I believe some of Stereophile's other reviewers (LG?) are still using Levinson amps of this vintage. We have higher-specification DAC chips now, and higher-resolution digital, but the analog output stage and overall design and attention to detail have almost as much to do with ultimate sound quality, and long-term listening pleasure.